Ultra Fine Gold... Very Hard to Catch!

[Zacksgold]

Hey guys, I know it might be a long read but the help is needed,

Me and a few guys have come across a beach that’s full of black sands. So the natural thing to do as a curious prospector is... to pan for gold. And low and behold its quite rich, but here’s the caveat, its the tiniest gold you can ever come across. We're quite the rookies in this field (started about 3 months ago) so we went online in search of equipment that would help us get the gold from the sand or at the very least get concentrates. We saw allot of success with the 'Gold Cube' online with black sands and the many recommendations online that its great at fine gold esp with black beach sand. Allow me to emphasise how tiny this gold is, its so small that when place on a paper, any tiny incorrect handling of the paper will make the gold go poof, its so tiny that you can see many golds floating on the water surface. We also have a blue bowl and its pretty much useless as a decent amount of the gold would get sucked with the black sand even at low speeds (and yes we do add soap to prevent gold from floating). From the videos online that use the 'Gold Cube' esp the 4 stack, the first layer typically captures 80-90%+ of the gold and the second layer would catch the rest and you'd barely be able to find anything on the third layer. In our case however (and there are pictures uploaded for your eyes to witness), all 3 layers catch almost the same amount of gold If I didn’t write on the images which cons came from which layer you'd most likely not be able to tell which cons is from which layer. This made us conclude 2 things. Firstly, that the cube is most definitely losing gold shown by how much is captured by the last layer on the 'Gold Cube' (bad migration). And secondly, is that we need better equipment/plan/advice/help... etc you name it. And hence why we are here. Assuming budget is not an issue, what is the most suitable piece of equipment that is specialized at very very fine gold for beach black sand (and the variation in size from one gold grain to another is almost the same, they're all super tiny!). We are not looking for a multipurpose equipment that can do well on other gold ie. Placer, Alluvial, etc… We want a solution only for this situation as the beach is quite big and most of it contains gold so we believe it would be worth it to invest in a specialized piece of equipment for this situation. The black sand on the beach is perfect when it comes to not needing to classify it (there’s no rocks/pebbles/seashells etc...). Any form of help/advice would be appreciated, and like I said put budget aside as we want to lay down all options without constraints.

Believe it or not these images are from less than half a ton (metric) of black sand.

Thanks

 

[FrugalRefiner]

I've never used one, but from what I've read, a shaker table may be what you need. Others will probably have recommendations. There is a company called, I believe, Mount Baker Mining that makes them and produces a lot of videos. I don't have a link to their web site, but I'm sure someone else will provide it. I think they may even do a test run with your material to see how well it does.

Best of luck!

Dave

 

[Deano]

What is the status of your beach, can you put in place a mining lease or is it a protected public area.
How good is the status of any mining lease, can Omani authorities suit themselves regarding you getting and holding such leases.
If you can get a mining lease what prohibitions will apply.
Are beachgoers going to be upset about any mining on beaches, this is a separate issue to the legalities of an operation and public opinion can be a powerful issue.
What is the scale of possible operations including adjacent areas and what lease areas can be worked at a time.
The answers to these questions will give you directions to look at regarding gold recovery in your circumstances.
Deano

 

[Martijn]

I've never used one, but from what I've read, a shaker table may be what you need. Others will probably have recommendations. There is a company called, I believe, Mount Baker Mining that makes them and produces a lot of videos. I don't have a link to their web site, but I'm sure someone else will provide it. I think they may even do a test run with your material to see how well it does.

Best of luck!

Dave

 

[galenrog]

Several years ago, I did use a Gold Cube on sands from a public beach that was heavily worked 100-150 years ago. Still quite a bit of very fine gold.

The gold cube was very good at producing a reasonably rich concentrate. Since black sands there were heavy with refractory minerals, and somewhat larger than the gold, much of the heaviest sand was retained by the Gold Cube. I took the concentrates home for a time.

An acquaintance, in central Nevada at the time, suggested I bring the gold laden sands with me next time I headed his way. I did just that.

He had set up on his property a shaker table much like those used by Jason at Mount Baker. It was used to separate gold from heavy sands from several drywashing projects.

It worked well. When done, we had a 99+% clean product.

A similar setup could benefit you. Gold Cube to produce a concentrate, followed by a shaker table to produce a more easily salable product. You could also take it one step further and refine the product from shaker table.

Enjoy.

Time for more coffee.

 

[Honda350x]

A shaker table would work, also a miller table. A little bit more tedious way , is after you have ran it through the cube, if you have a plastic cup and a strong magnet, you can have your concentrates in a pan with water in it, put the magnet in the plastic cup, and hold it about a quarter inch above your concentrates. The metallic metals in the black sands are magnetic, while jump to the magnet, the flour gold is not, should stay at the bottom. Plastic cup makes it easy to clean the magnet, or black sand that sticks to it. Let the sands get picked up through the water, otherwise you may have some gold stuck with them and lose it. I use a resurculating system called a black magic for my flour gold, don't know if they make them anymore. Also read you use soap to keep the gold from floating, jet dry in my opinion is a better surface tension breaker to use. Hope this helps

 

[nickvc]

Theres a YouTube channel called flour gold wizards run by a nice guy called Jason I believe , he has done many videos on beach mining and even his streams only tend to produce very fine particles, he collects the concentrates and then uses a mini sluice with his own water feed and it seems to work very well.
Take a look it may be just what you need or give you ideas.

 

[minero74]

Gold cube is king in beach mining
if you find a way to recirculating the water and add Jet dry or soap.

the key is digging until You hit the very deep blue or purple color black sand
or some time a red rusty color
there is where the gold is in beach mining

and never throw away those big grain of black sand
some times there is gold lock inside those grain.

I roasted in an iron pan and when is cool down I pulverized and panned again.

and most of the time I get a very very fine gold.

 

[jobinyt]

Need more information

1) is the gold all free or is some contained in the black sand particles?

2) are you doing any preliminary steps to concentrate the heavy material?

Regardless: the key to physically separating the gold you are struggling with is to classify/screen/sort the input by size. Since the gold all seems to be the same size this should be easy. Likely there is little material smaller than your gold - it has washed away. If not let me know. If so, a cheap simple reliable process woud be to set up a SEQUENCE of screens. Each screen removes the course fraction of what it is fed with smaller material falling through the screen and onto the next/finer screen. Screen gauge, length, leading slick plate, wet or dry material, slope, and induced vibration motion are based on experience and experiment . The fraction containing the gold needs to have a particle size range no greater than than the largest particle being 10 times bigger than the smallest particle - but since your gold is consistent in size, tighten the range to 2 to 3x.

Classification is the key to separation. Makes little difference if you use one of the methods already mentioned or other, as yet, unnamed methods - they all work faster and with less gold loss if the material is tightly sized. You might enclose your system in a trailer or tent to delay imatators as long as possible. If appropriate, the first unit provides the knowledge for building a large production unit sized for the available resource

 

[cornishrene8]

I had similiar problems resulting in too much time spent to recover ultra fine gold.I built a small ball mill to powder my ore and as stated elsewhere,classifying to 2 sizes, <50,<30 was helpful. Utube provided instructions for a very simple and efficient diy miller table. Cheap and very efficient. Worked first time and saves tons of time.